Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists
How do they do it?
How is it that some people have managed to make the break from being:
a part-time artist who doesn’t sell their work and has a day job they hate
to being:
someone with a website that people actually visit and who makes some income from their art?
You’ve set up your site. It looks great.
But nobody is visiting.
It’s like you organised a dinner party, cooked your best dish, got all dressed up…
And no-one turned up.
It’s new, it’s exciting, more and more people are doing it. It’s nothing short of a new paradigm for artists, an entirely new business model for us.
It promises complete independence. No gallery cut. You get to choose what you paint.
What follows is just my take of course. But I’ve been doing this pretty successfully for a couple of years now, and this is what I’ve learned from the front lines.
It seems like the dream to a lot of people.
You just paint what you want and sell it directly on your site. No galleries taking 50% of your work. No-one telling you what to paint.
Nice and simple.
But there are a few things you might not realise when you start out – or even before you’ve started setting it up – that you need to think about.
My heart was in my mouth…
I’d just set up the first auction of a piece of my work on my web site.
My mouse pointer was hovering over the “publish” button, but I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to click it.
I must admit I was a bit excited. I’d never seen apples as beautiful, as interesting, as these.
I had so many bags of them in my arms that I kept dropping them.
And I’d never seen so many apples in one place. They were everywhere. And not the usual apples you see in the supermarket, grown for high yield and selected for uniformity.
These were real apples.
From the start of this painting I had in mind an idea that I could use the paint expressively to describe the lumpy-ness of this beautiful quince.
And I had a rough picture in my head of how it would look when it was finished.
Still, as I was starting, at the top of my mind were thoughts of past paintings where I’d tried to paint more expressively, to create texture with the paint, and pretty much fallen flat on my face.
Mostly because I’d lost the form and the accuracy of the drawing.
So what do you do when you want to paint more loosely and expressively?
I was getting more uncomfortable as we walked along – Michelle, the kids and I. Surely this was private land?
Our eldest boy (just turned 9) had told us about these amazing apple trees just around the corner, so we’d come prepared with a big bowl and an old iron bucket.
And the trees were amazing.
I was at the end of the painting. I thought it was finished. But something was bothering me.
When I looked at it agin the next day, I realised it was the shadows in the background. they just weren’t reading right, they didn’t have the depth and luminosity of the shadows I could see in the subject.
And actually, I’d struggled with them throughout the painting.
It’s a surprising approach to colour. It seems almost scientific at first.
And I think that when people first come across it, it throws them a little. Because we’re so used to thinking about colour in very vague and mostly emotional terms.
So when someone starts to wonder what colour things really are, and wants to try to translate those colours into paint, this vagueness obscures something that is, in fact, rather straight forward – if only we can find our way through the fog.
